Thursday, September 3, 2009

I've just confirmed that I'll be giving a talk in Calgary on November 17th, 2009 at Tech Days Canada. Incidentally, that's also my sister's birthday - this one's for you Heather ;)

The talk will be an introduction to Test Driven Development and how it can reduce the number of defects in your software. More to come on this, but this two day event should be pretty good. I highly recommend the 2nd day of the "Developing for Microsoft based-platforms" as it has two sessions on ASP.NET MVC.

2 comments:

hey Jonathan, i'd like to see a video/slides of that talk of yours, if possible. We've been trying to advocate tdd at a certain project and we've been facing a lot of pushbacks. It's probably a very hard concept for some people to grasp, but there has to be a way to explain it so that they understand the importance of doing it, and doing it right.

I have often faced this kind of resistance to TDD from managers and other developers. Like all things in consulting it's a matter of trying to figure out exactly what their objections are. If they say it will hurt productivity and are more analytical I'd point them to the TDD study done by Microsoft.

Others will resist it because it counter to how we've all learned to write code. For these I've prepared presentations and hands-on labs to practice it in a safer environment outside of the project context.

An interesting follow-on to that is to arrange a TDD vs. non-TDD face-off to see how quickly a pair or individual can complete the same requirement first with the fewest defects.

Hope those ideas help, but feel free to contact me by email if you'd like to talk some more.